Capillary filling in microchannels patterned by posts

Abstract

We investigate the capillary filling of three dimensional micro-channels with surfaces patterned by posts of square cross section. We show that pinning on the edges of the posts suppresses, and can halt, capillary filling. We stress the importance of the channel walls in controlling whether filling can occur. In particular for channels higher than the distance between adjacent posts, filling occurs for contact angles less than a threshold angle \sim 55 deg., independent of the height of the channel.

To appear in Phys. Rev. E

References in corpus (4)

• Capillary Rise in Nanopores: Molecular Dynamics Evidence for the Lucas-Washburn Equation
• Capillary filling in patterned channels
• Contact line dynamics in binary lattice Boltzmann simulations
• Capillary filling with wall corrugations] Capillary filling in microchannels with wall corrugations: A comparative study of the Concus-Finn criterion by continuum, kinetic and atomistic approaches

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